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Commentary: Socialized medicine seeks Charlie Gard’s death

Commentary: Socialized medicine seeks Charlie Gard’s death

This is an undated photo of sick baby Charlie Gard provided by his family, taken at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. A British court will have a new hearing Thursday, July 13 in the case of 11-month-old Charlie Gard as his parents plead with judges to allow the terminally ill infant to receive experimental treatment for his rare genetic disease, mitochondrial depletion syndrome. (Family of Charlie Gard via AP)

Charlie Gard has been sentenced to death. He is eleven months old and on life support because of a rare genetic disorder.

Gard’s doctors in England have said he has suffered severe brain damage because of his condition called encephalomyopathic mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome (MDDS). Doctor say Gard cannot breathe without a ventilator and should be taken off life support and be allowed to die. Courts in England have agreed.

Gard’s parents, however, are fighting doctors to keep him on life support so they can take him to the U.S. for experimental treatment.

Gard was handed this death sentence for three reasons: He lives in a country with socialized medicine; while it is possible to treat but not cure the illness, the government has unilaterally made the decisions concerning his pain, chances of survival, and dignity; and the government has made the decision and must stick to it at all costs to prove the point that they have total control of the British subjects’ lives. The parents have been left out of the process.

But his parents, Connie Yates and Chris Gard, are fighting for their son’s life. By all accounts, they are good parents and entirely rational in their thinking. They have appealed for help and have received it.

They now have raised $1.6 million to treat their son. A physician in the U.S. has come forward and volunteered to treat the infant. This doctor has successfully saved at least one child’s life who was suffering from the same insidious illness. This extremely rare mitochondrial disease causes degenerative muscle weakness and organ failure.

As it was explained to me, it prevents proper metabolic process and thus nourishment cannot be turned into energy in the patient’s cells. Doctors have used the treatment proposed for Gard in the U.S. to treat some types of mitochondrial disease. It has shown success in reducing symptoms of some mitochondrial diseases in laboratory mice. The treatment has been used on a small number of children who have shown improvement, according to ABC News.

However, the treatment has not been used on mice or children with the type of mitochondrial disease that Gard suffers from, ABC News reported.

The medical government bureaucracy put its jackboot down and has refused the treatment for Gard. The child cannot be sent to the U.S. for treatment. You see, that would cause a loss of face for the medical bureaucrats and that loss translates into a loss of control. Control is far more important to government than its citizens’ lives.

Now, thankfully, others have become involved. The Vatican asked the British government to send the child there. I assume the child would then be able to travel wherever for treatment. President Donald Trump is exploring making Charlie Gard a U.S. citizen to facilitate his treatment here. Yet, the socialist medical controllers resist.

The case was sent to the European Union equivalent of the U.S. Supreme Court and it also agreed it was best for Charlie to die, again, with dignity.

Folks, I think that Gard will eventually be treated in the U.S. If he dies now as a victim of the socialized medical system, the world will know exactly the path to death which is charted for the citizens of countries that embrace it. But it’s too late. We already know.

When the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) was being crafted in secret by the Democrat congressional majority, the issue of death panels was brought up by Republicans who understood that the ACA would eventually fail, and that the methodology of failure was its bankruptcy.

So, what is the reason Gard must die? Money. The European bureaucrats made the callous decision that it would not be cost effective to spend money on him, even in the face of possible treatment.

This callousness is exactly what we are facing here in the aftermath of the ACA’s collapse. We were given a lot of goodies in the ACA that knowingly could not be sustained. Health insurance companies are now failing and pulling out of the ACA right and left, and the socialists here are licking their lips at how much control they can grab when it all falls apart.

There is a solution, but it will take some real courage on the part of Congress to ignore K Street lobbyist money to get it done. The more government regulates, the more expensive the subject of the regulations becomes. For example, there has been a prohibition for health care insurers to sell insurance across state lines. Why? Again, it is money. Such laws, restrict competition, and that is exactly what insurers want.

It is likely that the free market ideas of Sen. Ted Cruz will work in the long run. One example is allowing people to form health insurance purchasing groups which increases their insurance buying power.

Gard had no purchasing power and he was sentenced to die. Socialism fails again.